The Happiness Project
In the Happiness Project our class researched all of the key elements that contribute to happiness. We participated in many class activities that factored towards our research like meditation, flow day, mood food, our Library trip, and reading countless numbers of articles. We meditated to learn more about mindfulness and why it is important for the human brain and body. Flow day was the day that we participated in tons of fun activities that our student teacher, Trevor had planned! We made friendship bracelets, learned The Cup Song, sang some karaoke, played some board games, and colored like 1s graders! It was an awesome day where all we focused on was getting in "The Zone" which is more commonly known as "Flow". Mood food day was the day that our groups of four chose a certain number of healthy foods and created our own dish with them. We created fruit salad, stuffed bell peppers, and many other delicious, healthy dishes. But I think that the best thing we did was our field trip to the San Diego Downtown Library. The tour was amazing! After the tour we were taken to a room where we could research articles and information from all of the library's different data bases. We used all of these resources later on to fill our research binders.
Our research binders are where we stored all of our articles that we were going to use for the project. We had to choose six elements that we thought contributed to happiness the most. After we had chosen our elements we needed to find three sources from either the internet, an article, or an online database. Once we had all of our research completed we wrote topic papers for each of the elements. The topic papers needed to include quotes and parenthetical citations, how our topics affected us, and what we thought through all of our research our topics really meant. After all six of our topic papers were finished it was time to begin work on or final products. We had the choice of creating a cookbook, a children's book, a field guide, or a graphic novel. There were specific guidelines for each type of final product. I made a cook book, except for the fact that it was more of a figurative potion book and I called it Happiness Alchemy.
Throughout this project I learned many new skills that will help me as I move on in my high school career. I learned how to do scholarly research and how to use online databases effectively, how to put my citations in MLA format, learned how to annotate and Soapstone my articles. Soapstone is a complex text reading strategy that is commonly used when answering questions about articles such as the speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone.
But I believe that the most important part of this project that I learned was what happiness truly is and how anyone can obtain it. I spent many weeks researching what happiness really is and I think that we've all found our answers. Happiness can't be defined as one simple thing. It is a massive operation with many different components of life that contribute to it. Although you might not always be happy or understand what happiness is, you can understand that it exists and it is always within our reach.
Our research binders are where we stored all of our articles that we were going to use for the project. We had to choose six elements that we thought contributed to happiness the most. After we had chosen our elements we needed to find three sources from either the internet, an article, or an online database. Once we had all of our research completed we wrote topic papers for each of the elements. The topic papers needed to include quotes and parenthetical citations, how our topics affected us, and what we thought through all of our research our topics really meant. After all six of our topic papers were finished it was time to begin work on or final products. We had the choice of creating a cookbook, a children's book, a field guide, or a graphic novel. There were specific guidelines for each type of final product. I made a cook book, except for the fact that it was more of a figurative potion book and I called it Happiness Alchemy.
Throughout this project I learned many new skills that will help me as I move on in my high school career. I learned how to do scholarly research and how to use online databases effectively, how to put my citations in MLA format, learned how to annotate and Soapstone my articles. Soapstone is a complex text reading strategy that is commonly used when answering questions about articles such as the speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone.
But I believe that the most important part of this project that I learned was what happiness truly is and how anyone can obtain it. I spent many weeks researching what happiness really is and I think that we've all found our answers. Happiness can't be defined as one simple thing. It is a massive operation with many different components of life that contribute to it. Although you might not always be happy or understand what happiness is, you can understand that it exists and it is always within our reach.
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lifestyle-topic-paper.docx |
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mindfulness-topic-paper.docx |